Page 10 of Dare

I came for her. My boot heels struck the wharf as I dismounted from the great stag and thrust my gaze toward Summer’s castle. The fortress stretched across a bluff, extending horizontally instead of vertically. Its towers, parapets, and colonnades spanned a cliff range, with gold banners punching the wind.

One tower in particular claimed my attention. The structure rose like an exposed target. A clean shot.

Winter knights cantered to a halt behind me. Taking my descent as permission, they disembarked from their own stags, having led the fauna from our ship upon docking. Around us, the ocean thrashed like a colossus smashing its skull into the surf. Quite the invasion of sound compared with the calculating silence of Winter.

Nicking my head sideways to loosen a kink, I pinned my gaze to the Fools Tower. Choking the reins once, I released the animal, knowing it would follow. While dissecting the edifice, I stalked forward, an order corroding on my tongue. “No one touches the prisoner but me.”

My retinue would not be a problem. The instruction had been intended for Summer’s warriors, to whom the order would be dispatched. They would obey or have their intestines extracted.

As we strode toward the fortress, the knights fell quiet. Something had registered to them—a glaring, grammatical error—a half-second before the knowledge spasmed through my consciousness. They hadn’t said it, but they’d heard the mistake.

My fingers stretched, preparing to squeeze something until it shattered. Prisoners. Plural. That’s what I should have said.

6

Flare

Jail cells were all the same in Summer. Dark, clammy, and guarded by brutes.

Lying on my back, I rested atop a bed of moldy rushes covering the stone floor. Whereas Autumn’s dungeon had provided clean cages, high windows to let in the fresh air, and edible food thanks to Poet and Briar, this place reeked of dead fish, the funk having seeped into the walls. Although King Rhys had erected this so-called “Fools Tower” only a year ago, it smelled like the slop they fed us, as if it had been festering for a thousand years, provided they fed us at all.

To distract myself from the scent of decay, I peered through the murk, staring at the lyrics scratched into the ceiling. While balancing on uneven nodules projecting from the wall and using the tip of a whelk, I’d worked in the dead of night when the guards hadn’t been looking. Because they were less likely to glance up, the ceiling had been the perfect spot to engrave Summer’s song.

Gazing at the lyrics, my eyes stung. I longed to dissolve into the words, into the hidden map, to disappear from this place. I yearned to break open every latch in this cell block, spring my neighbors loose, and take them with me.

Still, I refused to give the wardens my tears. They’d robbed me of enough precious things. Even our sadistic king would have to pry the sorrow from me. Not that he cared whether his captives and slaves suffered, or if he was the cause.

A week had passed since the soldiers tossed me in here, forgotten and forgettable to this kingdom. Between Summer and Autumn, dungeons had been my home since childhood. But after being dragged back to where I had originally started, they’d flung me into this newly established tower, which the Crown had built to compensate for the overflow of prisoners.

There was Lorelei, the woman split by two selves, fluctuating between a gleeful child and their scolding mother. Dante, the elder male who spoke to the ghosts of the formerly imprisoned. And Pearl, with irises like shimmering oysters and a nose as large as ore. She suffered from bouts of panic, believing hiccups meant her lungs were shrinking or the pounding of her heart meant she was dying.

Summer belittled her plight, calling it hysteria. This Season tended to call everything about us hysterical. Our homeland didn’t know any better and had never tried to.

Like me, these captives had been relocated to the tower. However, we shared a history, having lived among one another for nearly ten years.

In fact, there used to be more of us. Several years before I went to Autumn, I had shared my old cell with Rune. The young man had been consumed with inventing spells to the point where he’d yank out his hair, frustrated by his failed attempts at sorcery.

Though that hadn’t been the only thing engrossing him, late at night while our tower mates were asleep. I’d been nineteen and yearning for an escape, a release from the misery of this place. At my invitation, Rune had used his body to give me that relief, fucking away my virginity with one swift jab of his cock. It became a routine with us, though the sex hadn’t yielded the sort of pleasure I’d heard about from other prisoners, and the aftereffects hadn’t lasted long enough to provide solace. Even now in my twenty-second year of life, I’d never known the bliss others spoke of, despite seeking it with my own hand after Rune had died from an infection.

Sweat dampened my flesh, the sensation pulling me from the memory. My billowy pants and camisole stuck to my body like film. Because I hadn’t changed clothes since my capture, muck stained the fabric, and the unwashed garments emitted a stale scent.

Not that it troubled me. I had plenty of other things to worry about like the hunger gnawing on my gut, the water bug scabs encrusted on my arms, and the venomous gleam in the guards’ eyes.

An uncommon silence enveloped the prison. I didn’t trust this sort of anticipatory quiet. The cell block seemed to hold its breath like the inside of a tomb.

Or maybe it was nothing. I’d been on edge from the moment the barred doors of my cage had swung closed. Every day since, I had expected the arrival of a certain villainous Royal.

Poet and Briar had no idea what had happened to me. I lacked parchment, a surface on which to scribble them a note, and a messenger butterfly. It would take a while before my friends suspected something, once my secret tidings stopped arriving. Until then, anything could happen.

He could happen.

I needed to escape before then. Seven days since my captivity, and my mind was still toiling for a way to break from here.

Commotion drifted from the stairway. Boots stomped along the corridor, the ruckus belonging to a large group heading in this direction, their torches flinging orange light across the cavity and illuminating the bars of a dozen cells. As they approached, their silhouettes reflected against the walls.

Rising on my elbow, I cocked my head to listen. I could tell the time based on how the darkness shifted with each hour. It was too early in the afternoon for water and gruel, much less for the guards to be in a baiting mood.

No. They were coming here for a different reason.

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